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The Land Report Is Published Three Times a Year The L and Report A publication of The Land Institute / Number 82 / Summer 2005 Contents Civic Agriculture: A Cart in Need of Horses Bill Vitek . 3 History’s Play on Light and Shadow Wes Jackson . 6 It’s the Ecology William H. MacLeish . 13 Why Perennial Grains Are Possible Jake Doll . 16 Our Symbiotic Relation with Graduate Students . 18 A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Powwow Roger L. Welsch . 20 Tasting the Dust Jean Janzen . 21 Our Mission Statement When people, land and community are as one, all Biting the Land That Feeds Us three members prosper; when they relate not as Jim Scharplaz . 22 members but as competing interests, all three are exploited. By consulting nature as the source and Rural War . 23 measure of that membership, The Land Institute At the Land . 24 seeks to develop an agriculture that will save soil from being lost or poisoned while promoting a Prairie Festival 2005 . 26 community life at once prosperous and enduring. Thanks to Our Contributors . 27 Prairie Festival 2004 Audio Tapes . 28 The Land Report is published three times a year. The Writers and Photographers . 30 Editor: Scott Bontz Associate editor and production: Donation Form . 31 Darlene Wolf Graphic design: Arrow Printing Arts associate: Terry Evans Printed by Arrow Printing Co. 2440 E. Water Well Rd. Cover: John Szarkowski . From Staff: Ron Armstrong, Salina, KS 67401 Mr. Bristol’s Barn . Wes Jackson Marty Bender, Scott Bontz, Cindy Cox, Stan Cox, (785) 823-5376, phone writes about the connection of Lee DeHaan, Jerry Glover, (785) 823-8728, fax botanist Liberty Hyde Bailey and Stephanie Hutchinson, [email protected] his time with the photographs of Joan Jackson, Wes Jackson, John Szarkowski. See page 6. Patricia Johnson, Steven Lancaster, www.landinstitute.org Grant Mallett, Patty Melander, Bob Pinkall, Harris Rayl, ISSN 1093-1171 Above: Scott Bontz. Fossil halves Steve Renich, John Schmidt, of a fern about 300 million years Tiffany Stucky, David Van Tassel, old, found in northern Illinois. Ken Warren, Darlene Wolf Shown about two-thirds life size. Board of Directors: Strachan Donnelley, Terry Evans, Pete Ferrell, Jan Flora, Dan Glickman, Wes Jackson, Eulah Laucks (emeritus), Mary Laucks, Conn Nugent, Victoria Ranney, John Simpson, Donald Worster, Angus Wright The Land Report 2 Can laissez-faire economics, technology, consumption and rule of law replace community, social capital, thrift and the common good? Civic Agriculture: A Cart In Need of Horses Bill Vitek Sociologist Thomas A. Lyson coined the term “civic Lyson uses the second half of his book to make the case agriculture” in 1999, and published a book by the same for civic agriculture’s reality, rationality and viability. He name in 2004. Lyson defines civic agriculture as a rightly points out that it never disappeared entirely, and “locally organized system of agriculture and food pro - that it is now enjoying something of a resurgence, both duction characterized by networks of producers who are on the farm and in the academe. He cites influential bound together by place.” His short, accessible and work by social scientists C. Wright Mills, Melville informative book covers themes common to readers of Ulmer and Walter Goldschmidt for evidence of both the The Land Report: economic and civic value of small-scale farming. From the earlier influences of Alexis de Tocqueville and Karl I Beginning with the 1862 Morrill Act’s mission to Polanyi, to a new generation of scholarship, the academe “bring rationality and standardization to agricultural is likewise reinvigorating and reclaiming the relevance production,” American agriculture has a long history of social factors beyond the neoclassical economic indi - of commodification, concentration and consolidation. cators of land, labor, capital and management. I Like modernization of so many other manufactured The news on the farm is promising as well. Lyson products and processes, the winners in industrialized points to the steady growth of farmers selling direct by agriculture are financial lenders, large corporations subscription, restaurant agriculture, farmers markets, and—if cheap, abundant and relatively tasteless food roadside stands, and urban agriculture and community is the goal—well-fed consumers. gardens. Data on these are harder to come by, but Lyson I The losers are small, independent owners and produc - found trends over the past 30 years in New York state ers, and consumers who want diverse, healthful and that show healthy growth across the board. flavorful food choices. Lyson believes promotion of civic agriculture will I Farming has now gone global, further distancing pro - come from the bottom up, from individuals and commu - duction from consumption, and increasing the power nity groups reasserting their rights to healthful food and and influence of fewer companies and those who con - healthy communities, and from local and statewide trol them. Lyson cites a study that identifies a mere efforts that enforce zoning regulations that protect small 138 men and women sitting on the boards of less than farmers, educate consumers about community-based a dozen businesses that control half of the food sold farming and promote institutional policies to buy local in America. food. I The larger effects include erosion of the many and That’s the good news. varied social, economic and even psychological bene - The not-so-good news is that civic agriculture—or fits from the informal networks that put the “culture” whatever we choose to call the varied responses to glob - in agriculture. al-industrial agriculture—is David without a slingshot. I Finally, the logic of unassailability and inevitability Much has been lost from civic infrastructure that made employed by agricultural economists and scientists civic agriculture possible, while the opposition continues masks their inability to measure or even to acknowl - to grow and to concentrate its political, financial and edge social capital and informal economies. structural advantages. I want to offer a more dismal Inevitably, what fails to be measured becomes invisi - assessment of our chances, in hope that by honestly ble, while its proponents—who also tend to be the acknowledging the odds, we have a better shot at over - severest critics of agriculture’s industrialization—are coming them. viewed as irrational, romantic, naive and unpatriotic. A civic agriculture needs both an agricultural and a The Land Report 3 civic agenda that can respond to the challenges of feed - private ambition, limited government, economic growth, ing 21st century Americans—and the citizens of other technological advancement, consumption and the rule of nations, though not necessarily “the world”—good, law replace community, social capital, public life, thrift, healthful food while giving our farmers a good liveli - virtue and the common good? The status quo answer to hood and protecting ecosystem health. We’ve come a this question has always been an enthusiastic “Yes!” And good distance with agriculture, as readers of this publi - it has been easy to demonstrate, thanks to the United cation know well. But we’ve lost ground on the civic States’ uncommon and largely unacknowledged blessing front. of the world’s greatest geological inheritance: soils and “Civic” means “belonging to the citizen.” What, the rich ecosystem resources they support, and water, then, do we mean by citizen? According to this country’s minerals, coal, oil and gas—now all in a steep, poten - major institutions of government, commerce and educa - tially irreversible decline. The varied social movements tion, not much early in America’s third century, and less in American history —transcendental, progressive, and less all the time. preservation, labor, women’s suffrage, civil rights, envi - The constitutional framers ultimately rejected a tra - ronmental and now civic agriculture—can be interpreted ditional republic where government has a direct role in as an enthusiastic but relatively ineffective “No!” They creating virtuous citizens. They favored a representa - have always been reactions against, rather than replace - tional republic of individuated members free to pursue ments of, the status quo, always trying to slow or derail life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness as defined by the train rather than replacing the tracks, and because each of them, and within the confines of the laws they have functioned, at best, as negative rather than designed to keep them apart. In his Democracy’s positive feedback loops. Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy, The civic renewal of which civic agriculture could political philosopher Michael Sandel called it “the pro - be a part will require, then, more than groups of inter - cedural republic.” Alexander Hamilton, America’s first ested folks who want to bring back local farming. It will Treasury secretary, went even further and argued that the require a rejection of the Enlightenment Substitution vices of ambition and vanity, when coupled with finan - Project, or at least its main tenets, and it will require a cial debt, could turn Americans into the hardest working major overhaul and rebuilding of America’s civic infra - people on the planet, and America into a world power. structure. It will require a civic architecture, a civic edu - Alexis de Tocqueville still saw a vibrant civic cul - cation, civic politics, civic economics and civic democ - ture in the America he visited in 1830, but he also saw a racy, to name a few. Such changes must occur at all lev -
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